After nearly a year of protest in New York City, fast-food workers expanded their picket lines Thursday to dozens of cities to demand $15-an-hour wages. Strikers say many workers are older, some supporting families, and can't live on $7.25 an hour.

ByChelsea B. Sheasley, CorrespondentAugust 29, 2013

Workers and their supporters protest outside a Burger King in Los Angeles on Thursday. The event is part of a broad strike by fast-food workers – the largest ever for the industry – to call for wages of $15 an hour.

Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

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Fast-food workers across America are going on strike Thursday in what they hope will be the largest strike ever for their industry.

Workers in at least 35 cities are expected to picket chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Wendy’s to demand higher wages and the right to unionize.

In July, about 2,200 fast-food workers participated in a one-day strike in seven cities, the largest effort to date. That followed nearly a year of protests that originated in New York City in November 2012.

Protesters are calling for $15-an-hour wages, more than double the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which would increase the annual earnings of a full-time employee from $15,000 a year to $31,000 a year.

While a young workforce and quick turnover have traditionally characterized the fast-food industry, protesters say the Great Recession caused more parents and older workers to rely on fast-food jobs. But they can’t survive on current wages, they say.

“Because of the difficulty of getting jobs in general … for people with relatively modest education levels, you have a lot of people working in these companies who are trying to support a family based upon their earnings alone,” Ronald Ehrenberg, a professor of industrial and labor relations and economics at Cornell University, told Time. “That’s very, very difficult to do.”

Industry officials counter that the demographics of fast-food workers haven’t substantially changed. Officials at the National Restaurant Association say only 5 percent of restaurant employees earn the federal minimum wage and that 7 of 10 fast-food workers earning an entry-level wage are under the age of 25.

Moreover, the number of strikers is also only a small percentage of the roughly 2.4 million fast-food workers in the United States, opponents say.

Supporters point to a study by the Economic Policy Institute that calculated that 88 percent of workers in jobs paying less than $10 an hour are older than 20, and a third are older than 40, reports USA Today.

At the federal level, President Obama and some members of Congress have pressed for a raise in the minimum wage – but nowhere near the protesters’ demands of $15 an hour. Mr. Obama supports a $9-an-hour minimum wage.

On Thursday, Labor Secretary Thomas Perez said the fast-food strikes show the need to raise the minimum wage.

A complicating factor in the fast-food wage fight is that most Mickey-Ds and Burger Kings are franchised, and local owners set wages.

“Nancy Salgado, 26, of Chicago, earns $8.25 an hour, Illinois' minimum wage, as a McDonald's cashier, though she has worked for the company for 10 years. Ms. Salgado, who has no health benefits, says she relies on Medicaid to provide health care for her two children and often skimps on their clothing purchases,” reports USA Today.

"If they give you a raise, it's like 10 cents [an hour]," she said. "I'm like, 'Really? You guys make millions and billions a year.' "

Denver

“Zendra Flores is a single parent making $8 an hour at a Subway sandwich shop on Federal Boulevard in Denver,” reports the Denver Post. “Flores wants to go back to school but is worried about supporting her 6-year-old.

"I am not looking to stay in fast food forever, I'm looking for another job with better wages, but I still think this is good to support," Ms. Flores said. "At first I thought the $15 was steep, but then I started thinking about it and that is what it would take."

“Morris Cornley, 57, began working as a delivery driver at a Jimmy John's gourmet sandwich outlet in Kansas City, Mo., early last year, after he was laid off from his $45,000-a-year truck-driving job. He earns $7.35 an hour and works about 33 hours a week, taking home $370 or so every two weeks after taxes,” according to USA Today.

"I'm not really living – I'm surviving," said Cornley, who plans to take part in demonstrations Thursday.

"These are the jobs that are out there – fast-food jobs," he said. "I could be in this industry for quite a long time and, if I am, I'd like to make a living wage."

“These companies that own these fast food restaurants, they make way too much money off the backs of the employees,” Dearius Merritt, a 24-year-old worker at Church’s Chicken in Memphis who earns $13 an hour and plans on participating in the demonstrations, told Time.

“I’m in the store every day with these workers that make $7.25.… If I’m 30 years old and this is what I have to do to survive, then I deserve a living wage off of it.”

North Carolina

“I make $7.85 at Burger King as a guest ambassador and team leader, where I train new employees on restaurant regulations and perform the manager's duties in their absence. Before Burger King, I worked at Church's for 12 years, starting at $6.30 and ending at just a little more than $8 an hour,” wrote Willietta Dukes in a Guardian opinion column.

“I've never walked off a job before. I don't consider myself an activist, and I've never been involved with politics. I'm a mother with two sons, and, like any mom knows, raising two teenage boys is tough. Raising them as a single mother, on less than $8 an hour, is nearly impossible, though.”

It's not fair that the top managers of our businesses make enough to put their kids through prestigious colleges, buy houses, and live well, and I am on food stamps and need public health care,” co-organizer Shonda Roberts of Oakland, Calif., told the San Francisco Chronicle.

"There are millions of people like me, and I think they can afford to pay us $15 an hour," she said. "We are worth it."